Yahoo reaches into its bag of tricks to deliver a welcome refresh of its …

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If you were wondering what happened to Oddpost, the early AJAX webmail service, wonder no more. Yahoo bought the project in 2004, and it has now resurfaced as the underpinnings of the recently released Yahoo Mail Beta (YMB). The new service has a fully AJAXified interface, a clean design, and the handful of new features you'd expect from a beta release.

Like Oddpost, YMB tries hard to look like a desktop application rather than a Web service. In fact, it looks like a direct Outlook ripoff in many ways, with roughly the same pane layout and a similar folder and service list on the left-hand side. The main difference is the advertising, of course, unless you're paying for ad-free premium Yahoo mail.

The new design fits right in with the frontpage overhaul that Yahoo went through earlier this year, and the AJAX functionality of the whole package is so Web 2.0 that it almost hurts. Oddpost is often cited as an inspiration for GMail, and it's easy to see the family resemblance. GMail doesn't try to look like a local app, though.

If you want to try YMB and already have a Yahoo Mail account, there's a fat link right on the main page of your existing service. Once you go there, YMB will become the default for every session, unless you switch back again using a tiny little link in the top-left corner.

The most obvious new feature is the RSS reader functionality. It's a simple reader that nestles right in the folder pane, and it will be populated with feeds from your My Yahoo page if you have one. Messages you want to keep can be dragged and dropped into any folder and will from then on be treated like e-mail messages. Mr. Diamond talks about mashups inside the mail application, such as weather forecasts and roadmaps relating to message content, but my testing failed to bring up any of these features. Perhaps they're planned for a later release.

One final point: YMB appears to be a resource hog. Simply loading the inbox with one solitary message brings my machine to its knees for a full minute. Maybe it's time for an upgrade, but you'd think an Athlon XP 2200 should be able to handle some mail. Other than that, YMB looks rather tasty, and there won't be much of a learning curve even for rather inexperienced users. But I'm addicted to GMail's "conversation" organization now, and YMB doesn't have an equivalent yet. Wake me up when that feature shows up.